Capturing Tiny Snakes

Excerpt

This is intended as a tutorial session for bringing up MicroPython on a common, and reasonably easy to obtain, microcontroller platform. From bare bones, to blinking LEDs and beyond.

Description

Microcontrollers have historically been a very hard platform to approach. There’s no OS masking the pain, and problems, of dealing directly with hardware. This makes microcontrollers very powerful, but it also makes them hard to approach. MicroPython takes care of some of this problem for you, and presents a microcontroller in a very familiar format to many programmer: via the Python programming language.

This is intended as a basic tutorial session, going over what MicroPython is, what it isn’t, how to bring it up on a board, and generally run through the process of interacting with physical hardware that may be present on the board.

For this, we’ll be bringing in a number of esp8266 based devices (one of the cheapest chips supported by micropython) that will have wifi, LEDs to blink and a few other sensors to play with. Please bring a laptop with a USB port and a terminal program that can communicate with the device.

Speaking experience

We both have a number of years of speaking experience, with multiple keynotes between us as well.

Speakers

Biography

Open Source Hardware builder and advocate, formerly of the MinnowBoard project, I tend to work on open source infrastructure when I’m not building ridiculous things like star ship bridges, replicas of K-9, or badges for conferences.

Biography

Terri has a PhD in horribleness, assuming we can all agree that web security is kind of horrible. She stopped working on skynet (err, automated program repair and AI) before robots from the future came to kill her and got a job in open source, which at least sounds safer. Now, she gets paid to break things and tell people they’re wrong, and maybe help fix things so that people won’t agree so readily with the first sentence of this bio in the future. She doesn’t get paid for her work on GNU Mailman or running Google Summer of Code for the Python Software Foundation, but she does those things too.

Sessions

For many novice speakers, especially technical speakers, the hardest part of presenting is not figuring out what to put in but what to leave out. But what works for an academic paper doesn’t work in a 10 minute presentation, and you risk boring your audience long before you manage to convince them of anything. This talk is intended to be a fun (and perhaps a bit silly) look at the science and the art of being convincing. I will cover how logical fallacies are used in propaganda, lying, and how you can use them to get your point across quickly. And don’t worry, we’ll also talk about how to do this ethically!